Marlow tells us about the conversation he overheard between two managers in the Company, “ ‘I say, trust to this.’I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river—seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart…You know the foolish notions that come to one sometimes. The high stillness confronted these two figures with its ominous patience, waiting for the passing away of a fantastic invasion.”
Marlow describes the man’s arm as a “flipper” as if the man resembled some sort of reptile by the way he justified killing a competitive colleague, implying Kurtz.
The employees of the Company fear that Kurtz outperforms them and therefore, he needs to be stopped. Fear is perhaps the most common motive for murder and for war. “We will not be free from unfair competition till one of these fellows is hanged for an example,” says one of the Company employees that Marlow overhears. This incident resembles our own modern day case of the vindictive Valerie Plame affair.
More recently in our history, our 43rd President, and perhaps more importantly his Vice President Cheney, characterized Iraq in various ways to justify its invasion and occupation. However, once the dust settled from "shock and awe," we all learned that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
In fact, Saudi Arabia had almost everything to do with 9/11. Yet our former oil executives in the White House respect the theocratic regime under the al-Saud Royalty--they at least deliver crude at a discount so long as they stay in power.
The Greek term, proschema equates to the Latin phrase, casus belli. The reasons stated by politicians may or may not be the actual reason for waging the war. Thucydides first popularized this concept in his History of the Peloponnesian War and identified fear, honor, and interest as the three primary real reasons that wars are waged, while proschemata commonly play up nationalism or fear-mongering –as opposed to reasonable fears or economic interests.
The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center served the Bush Administration as the obvious casus belli to pressure Congress to approve the so-called War on Terror, which resulted in the 2001 Afghan war and the 2003 Iraq Wars.
A well-documented case since then proves that members of the Bush Cabinet, mostly former top executives of Big Oil, had planned to invade and occupy Iraq long before these events occurred. The 9/11 attack simply handed them the apparent justification to declare the war they had long since planned and documented a decade earlier, espeically in PNAC.
After the facts were analyzed, it turned out that Iraq had no WMD’s, the primary justification for Bush’s war. Iraq had never supported any al-Qaeda operations. In fact, the war against terrorism is a war against a non-state enemy, a non-conventional war. Several CIA reports had already explained this based on the various previous terrorist attacks against the U.S., such as the bombing of the World Trade Center basement.
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